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Former CEO Dick Costolo and current CEO Jack Dorsey celebrate with Dorsey's cofounders Evan Williams and Biz Stone as Twitter rang the opening bell at the New York Stock Exchange in November 2013. The company now trades 75% off its high in 2014. (Photo by Andrew Burton/Getty Images)

A quick look at tech stocks so far in January 2016 reveals trading nearly 30% below its IPO price; hardware company GoPro down more than 40%. Both of Jack Dorsey's companies, Square and , have lost about one-fifth of the value on their share prices. Even stalwarts like and parent Alphabet are feeling a little hurt, down about 8%.

For private tech companies and startups, the question now is if general market anxiety has carried over to venture capital. And while the data suggests it's wrong, or at least too early, to panic just yet, veteran startup investors are starting to warn their portfolios that the rules of the game have changed.

As a full year, 2015 saw high levels of funding flow into startups and their later-stage private cousins. Global funding to VC-backed companies reached $128.5 billion by CB Insights' reckoning, a 44% jump from 2014, with $72.4 billion of that happening in the U.S. Using slightly different criteria, the National Venture Capital Association announced $58.8 billion in VC dollars invested stateside for the year, still good for the second highest year since 1995. "A gargantuan year that ended with a bit of a whimper," CB Insights CEO Anand Sanwal describes it.

The whimper: A major drop-off in deal flow later in the year that makes the amount of activity in early 2015 even more impressive but could mean that some startups looking to raise at generous valuations in 2016 have missed the boat. According to CB Insights' new annual report released on Tuesday, the fourth quarter of 2015 saw the lowest number of deals worldwide in nearly three years. Total dollars invested were the lowest since Q3 of 2014 for the U.S., with funding down 32% in dollars from Q3 in Asian markets. Just 12 startups reached the billion-dollar valuation mark in Q4 after 60 in the first nine months of the year. "There's still a lot of capital to deploy, but if you are out fundraising, you might say, 'Let's put the pedal down' and speed that up," Sanwal says.

The investors whose dollars he's tracking point mostly to the later stages of venture investing as the source for a slowdown. Midas List regular Josh Kopelman says that his firm First Round observed a drop in such "growth" rounds, happening at higher centi-million or billion-plus valuations, toward the end of the year—but was busier in Q4 than the quarter before. What's changed, Kopelman argues, is that companies with ambitious growth plans that spend a lot of money (losing cash is known as "burn") aren't getting the warm reception from the crossover and public markets firms that they do in a more bullish market. Companies can be big enough already that they're trusted for massive fundraises still, like Uber and Airbnb, or show clear enough economic forecasts to assuage those investors. But in general, "we're encouraging our later-stage companies to review their assumptions," Kopelman says.

One expert of later-stage investing, DFJ Growth partner Randy Glein, argues he still sees his part of the market as "reasonably healthy." Deal flow in mid-2015 was so hot that a slowdown later in the year is more "normalization" than correction, Glein says. Private valuations becoming more in line with what multiples off of revenue tech companies get on the public markets is overall a healthy development for the ecosystem, Glein argues. And with less of a "land grab" mentality among later-stage private investors, companies will find it necessary to raise more slowly and spend less, habits that wouldn't hurt their ability to succeed, just perhaps prolong the timeline.

A slowdown in funding as investors and founders adjust is good news for some investors who blinked last year at the buy-ins to play. The mid-2015 pace was too hot for many funds to be willing to overpay to keep up. In Q4, some investors began writing checks again after months on the sidelines as the terms came back down to earth. "Spending 2015 hit a peak and created an irrational funding cycle" that was "over-sized and over-heated," says Foundation Capital general partner Charles Moldow, whose firm has waited for the landscape to revert back to an environment he expects will be more "normal and healthy."

What investors find healthy, of course, is not always what might be ideal for the entrepreneurs. While startups may be more likely to avoid the fate of getting trapped into multi-billion valuations they then may struggle to maintain (see Dropbox "under siege"), or of going public and then getting hammered on the markets (see GoPro, Square and many more), not every company can quickly shift gears from a "go as big as you can" mindset to one of saving every extra dollar. "We are definitely having a different dialog with entrepreneurs these days," says Joe Horowitz, managing general partner at Icon Ventures, though he argues that companies that embrace the change can create more "enduring value" in the long-term anyway.

Others simply dispute that any one quarter, as year-altering as it might be, should give pause at all, especially as deal can be made and then placed on hold or announced weeks later. "I'm not aware of any VC who pays attention to any quarter to quarter data at all," says Marc Andreessen, the Midas List fixture and cofounder of firm Andreessen Horowitz.

At CB Insights, Sanwal actually tends to agree. The potential for Q4's drop-off to prove a momentary blip makes it too soon to predict the end of the world for startups raising money in 2016, he says, though he disputes the popular VC response that changes are coming mostly at the later stages of the pipeline. Nor can the data be explained away by seasonality of deferring announcements past the holidays, he argues."There's probably a bit of a lag in it affecting early stages, but that part just doesn't make sense to me," Sanwal says. "It misses the fact that this is like dominoes."

But if VCs say they welcome a return to startups being smarter about spending and what valuations they can get, who do the new rules affect the most? The toughest hit might be on early employees, Sanwal says, and the founders who have to give up the most to react to being measured on different terms. But there's also the chance that the most successful investments in upcoming months are made by VCs who choose to ignore the now-popular argument du jour and keep writing fat checks to force their way into the buzziest deals.

"VC is a heavy rubbernecking industry with maybe 20 really independent thinkers," Sanwal says. "If you look at what drives venture performance, it's the folks consistently investing over a cycle."